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Great balls of fire -- it's a singing physicist !

By Carrie Peyton Bee Staff Writer (Published Nov. 14, 2000)

(Randy Allen for The Bee)

When Lynda Williams wiggles into something slinky and silver, a grin spreads across her face, a gleam flares in her eyes, and she's ready to coo over quarks and belt one out about the "big bang."

This is not your average college physics instructor. This is the "physics chanteuse."

Along with teaching at California State University, San Francisco, Williams writes songs, produces CDs, runs a "Cosmic Cabaret" planetarium show, and attracts a small but highly educated following at scientific conferences from Geneva to Hawaii.

"I love the fact that she humanizes physics," said Jessica Denning, a teacher at Rio Tierra Junior High School in Sacramento who heard Williams lecture recently on ways to use music in the classroom. The glitz and wriggle are perfect for capturing the attention of appearance-conscious teenage girls, Denning said.

It seems to work on grown-ups, too.

Williams, 38, has been written up in journals such as "Physics Today" and was treated like a mini-celebrity by a passing physics professor at a science teachers conference in Sacramento last month.

Ray Hall, an assistant professor at California State University, Fresno, chuckled softly as he listened to Williams' disco-beat version of a derivation of a wave equation. "Such emotion ... to physics," he said with delight mingled with surprise. "Science is hard to make fun in a silly way," but Williams manages, and that's a rare trait, he said.

Fun is a high priority for the woman who is very likely the world's only physicist lounge singer. She bounds into rooms, laughs with her mouth wide open and came to science performing after being active in underground theater in Sacramento and Berlin. Along the way were stops at an ashram in the Santa Cruz mountains and a stint as a go-go dancer -- "it was a dance club, not a strip club!" she stresses.

On stage, Williams bumps, grinds, slithers and twirls while she twists her tongue around lines like "a wave carries energy as it goes. Sound waves make air molecules rock and roll. ... The higher the frequency the higher the pitch, and the faster the molecules twitch!"

She can get grade-schoolers giggling with a cheerleader-like routine illustrating tiny particles: "up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom, the world is made up of quarks and leptons." Or she can put on an act so sultry that she has heard it dismissed as "jiggle science," something that has made her sensitive to where she performs. Now, "I refuse to do a show if I'm the only woman at the conference," she said.

In a field where women are still not fully welcomed, Williams said, she too often sees high school girls trying to dumb themselves down, and too often sees college women framing their questions deferentially while men frame theirs assertively.

She hopes her music can draw more young women and minority youths into the sciences. Williams' own journey toward physics was an unexpected one for a girl who did well in math until "the puberty bell rang," and then flunked high school algebra. When the Auburn teenager made her way to California State University, Sacramento, in the early 1980s, she was initially drawn to philosophy.

"Then I realized math and physics were really at the core of philosophy," she said, the essence of what makes the world tick. "Physics is the most fundamental science. It kind of covers almost everything."

She dove into physics classes, catching on so fast that she soon began grading papers, while reviving a near-dead student physics club and sometimes working all night crafting hallway displays. "She was a ball of fire ... one of my all-time favorite students," said CSUS physics professor James Phelps.

The physics chanteuse was born more than a dozen years later, while Williams was getting her master's degree in physics at San Francisco State. What began as a hobby has turned into a second career in "science entertainment," with a scattering of international bookings, a Web page where her songs can be heard (http://204.142.196.76/pchant.html) and more CDs and performances on the way.

Next month, Williams will be entertaining astronomers and science writers at Bay Area meetings, and performing for the general public in a "Cosmic Cabaret" act at the planetarium at San Francisco State University on Dec. 9 and 16.

In between, she visits inner-city schools to try to interest youngsters in science, and encourages teachers to raid her Web page, free, for any material they think they can use. "I'm an educator," she said. "If people don't listen to my music, what's the point?"